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Death By A Thousand Twerps

If I were the President of Harvard University, I might wanna have a word with Matt Yglesias.

Matt – a prominent leftyblogger who’s gone on to write for a bunch of liberal rags – has a BA from Harvard. Like a lot of leftybloggers, he profited from the leftyblog audience’s hive mentality and got promoted far beyond even his Peter Principle value, to say nothing of his actual perception.

And it’s gotta be undercutting the value of that expensive Harvard sheepskin. Especially when he’s writing bilge like this, about planning ahead for the new GOP majority in Congress:

But the specific thing I would worry about isn’t gutting of health care legislation or endless investigations. It’s the economy. Anne Kornblut reports that the White House understands the basic political dynamic: “Even more important, senior administration officials said, Obama will need to oversee tangible improvements in the economy.”

So I know that tangible improvements in the economy are key to Obama’s re-election chances. And Douglas Hibbs knows that it’s key. And senior administration officials know that its key. So is it so unreasonable to think that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner may also know that it’s key? That rank and file Republicans know that it’s key? McConnell has clarified that his key goal in the Senate is to cause Barack Obama to lose in 2012 which if McConnell understands the situation correctly means doing everything in his power to reduce economic growth. Boehner has distanced himself from this theory, but many members of his caucus may agree with McConnell.

And Yglesias’ conclusion (emphasis added)?

Which is just to say that specifically the White House needs to be prepared not just for rough political tactics from the opposition (what else is new?) but for a true worst case scenario of deliberate economic sabotage.

Truly, truly dreadful.

The left; not only do they believe their ends justify their means, they believe everyone else believes it too.

Yglesias is as stupid on economics as he is on most other subjects.
The Fed is predicting anemic economic growth through 2011. GDP growth around 3.5%, unemployment 9%-10%. There is no “recovery” to sabotage.

Yglesias is simply repeating standard leftist dogma, albeit more crudely than an acadenic like Paul Krugman, which holds that it’s really easy to affect the economy by printing more money to give away and confiscating wealth from people who have earned it. Thus, the refusal to do those things is “economic sabotage.” When asked why the first couple of Keynesian stimuli did nothing, they’ll reply either (A) it wasn’t enough to offset the wretchedness of Bush or (B) it worked and things wouldhave been so much worse if we hadn’t done it. They don’t offer any evidence to back up the claim. It is an article of faith.

Yglesias has a reputation as being one of the Left’s “bright boys”. He is a salaried employee of the Center for American Progress, a liberal thinktank run by one-time Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta.
Though he is a step above Ollie Willis, Yglesias got the reputation for being brainy because he graduated from Harvard with a degree in philosophy. As far as I can tell his various blog entries and articles consist of regurgitated and poorly reasoned left wing talking points. There’s nothing new in his “ideas” and despite his degree he doesn’t seem to realize that correlation is not causation. Moreover, Yglesias seems to have gotten his degree without ever having a serious disagreement with his professors — weird in the field of philosophy.
Never went to grad school. Guess his GMAT score wasn’t good enough.